For example, after I enter the URL of the image (for example “http://www.site.com/picture.jpg”), the icon on the left should usually change to a green checkmark or a red “x”. For me, it does NEITHER: it just has this circle that keeps spinning around and around and never stops.

Really? Well I appreciate the response. I was hoping to use it to speed up my site. I’ve been told the site loads slowly, and I thought linking those images, and background image as well to an external server would help. Any suggestions on speeding it up? The images aren’t really huge files, considering what they are, largest one is around 450kb probably.

You can use caching plugins like W3TC: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/ to speed up loading times (however I suggest to download an older version (0.9.1.3) because the newest version which was released 3 days ago has some bugs and doesn’t work right).

Appreciate the help… I’d tried W3TC prior to posting, and it basically broke the theme. Good to know, I’ll try downloading an older version as you’ve stated. Regarding smush.it, I’ve tried that as well… out of 8 images, it saved me 396kb, leaving the smallest file at 233kb and the largest at 429kb… 13.92%, there wasn’t much room for downsizing. It’s a photography website, any further changes in quality would like begin to deteriorate the image quality to a point where it’s noticeable I think, but I could be wrong of course.

S/N… it would seem smush.it also removes the embedded color profiles. I’d forgotten the reason why I hadn’t already used it after trying once before, but color is rather important, some of the images are pretty dull without color management. Seems I have multiple issues here.

So I can’t edit my prior post, but I wanted to say I’ve gotten the site working again, along with the W3TC plugin. I’ve downsized my images by nearly 40% using smush.it, and re-saving (with the embedded color profile) in photoshop with the save for web feature. The largest image is 319kb now, smallest is 197kb, but I don’t believe I can go much further without deteriorating the image quality to a point that’s noticeable.